


Best Beloved of Twin Suns

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 03:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5692210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn dreams force visions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Best Beloved of Twin Suns

Finn wanders the sand, his black shirt stuck to his skin because sweat, warm and sticky, follows the long channel of his spine. But it burns too where his crash in the desert had rubbed him raw, the salt stinging, and he wonders if he is bleeding. His arms tire as he holds a worn leather jacket over his head, to shield him from the relentless suns and the relentless heat.

He wants to run, but the sand is too thick and too deep and so he trudges. Once, he looks back to see where he has been so that he knows where he goes but the sand has filled his footprints and there is nothing but gold expanse stretching beyond him.

He keeps going. He thinks he hears voices in the whispers of wind too hot to offer much in the way of relief from the heat, but he knows it's just the grains of sand sliding against each other.

Carefully, he makes his way down the dune. He slips, he falls. Sand sprays in delicate arcs from under his heels as he skids downwards, empty belly lurching up towards his parched throat--

He wakes for a moment, not in the desert, but in a bacta tank. Fluid suspends him, his limbs trailing as he floats. A mask provides him oxygen. Being back on Jakku is just a dream--the thought forms only tenuously before he drifts back to sleep that he might heal. 

He doesn't return to the desert. Nor does he return to surroundings that are more familiar to him: the steel lined halls of the numerous First Order bases in which he had grown, in which he had learned, in which he had learned to fight. His heart does not try to match the rhythm of the marching feet, always just a second off, never quite in sync. 

His fingers curl loosely toward his palm. Fluid flows through the channel of his hand, and he remembers the feel of the lightsaber, the heft of it in his palm. It is a weapon, and thus there is something familiar about it, but the shaft of blue, the hum of energy is unfamiliar, and he yearns for a moment of stillness so that he could hear what it might to say to him.

In the dark before dawn, flakes of snow sizzle against the blade, and he's alone in a white expanse. There are no footprints, and if there were, he imagines the blizzard must have erased them, and he stands alone without history. Cold seeps into his clothing which had kept him too hot in the desert and does nothing for him in the cold. He pulls the leather jacket closer around him, eyes seeping from the sheering slices of wind gusting through the snow. The air rises in blue vapor, and from the way his eyes weep, blurring his vision, it would have been easy to mistake them for wanderers, just like him, lost and alone, just like him.

He wonders if one of them might be Rey, and struggles to make his way to her.

The twin suns from before finally rise, melting the snows until he stands in the shallow shoals of an ocean. Shielding his eyes, he makes out an island in the distance. He thinks, maybe, that someone he knows might be there and so he wades towards it, the bottom shifting beneath his feet as the water, capped in white, cascade in waves of sand against his knees while the suns bleed and burn red as they sink beneath the horizon, dragging the ocean with them. 

Shocked, he wakes again. The medical droids are draining the bacta tank, and he feels heavy and old as his feet touch the hard glass bottom. Gear strapped to his thighs and arms keep him from collapsing, and they are very careful as he's lifted onto a gurney and floated away to a room of his own. He wonders where Poe and Rey are, but it is too hard to speak. He wonders if they have returned to Jakku, and he remembers his disbelieving voice asking why everyone wanted to go back there.

It's not until they lift him into his bed, until they put him on his side to keep pressure off his back, that Finn remembers that Jakku had only one sun, and not two. 

"Rest, my friend," someone says as they pull close to him.

If he dreams, he does not remember. 

When he wakes this time it feels different than before--more solid, as if he's doing more than just returning to consciousness for a few fading moments.

Poe's speaking to him, but in a language that Finn doesn't understand. When his vision clears, he sees that Poe is actually reading from a very old book whose paper is tattered and faded. He holds it in one hand and every time he comes to the end of the page, he braces the book against his knee so that he's free to flip the page and continue. His other hand is holding Finn's, his thumb going in lazy circles around Finn's knuckle. 

In the corner closest to Poe, BB-8 rocks back and forth, whistling softly to themself in a rhythm that complements the prose flowing through Poe's voice.

Finn's voice cracks as he murmurs, "Hey."

Poe stops reading and eagerly puts the book aside. He slides to his knees so that he can more clearly see Finn's face and says, "Hey, buddy."

"We made it?" Finn asks because the last real thing he remembers was feeling hot against the snow, and seeing Rey staggering to her feet towards him and Kylo Ren.  

Poe squeezes his hand. "We made it. But you just barely." His eyes look tired and haggard, as if he had not slept for a long time. "You gave us a real scare." He keeps his eyes on Finn's hand, now cradled in both of his. "You didn't have to stay behind, you know, to blow that thing after you got the shields down." His voice goes soft. "You completed my mission--again."

"Our friends needed help," Finn says. The words feel too dry and too big in his throat. He thinks about how most of the FN company are dead now. His eyes water. 

He doesn't want to think about that. He doesn't want to think about Kylo Ren. He doesn't want to think about Han Solo who had called out to the person who had killed him and touched his face as he died (and Finn thinks there's blood on his face, again, somehow seeping through the thick material of his mask--). To distract himself, he asks where Rey went, and Poe tells him that she went to get Luke Skywalker. 

Finn doesn't want to think about that either because having Skywalker back doesn't mean the end of the war--it'll go on and on and on. He knows this, knows it in his heart and in his blood that Kylo Ren had spilled and in the blood that had stained his helmet.

"She wanted me to tell you that she would see you again," Poe is saying. "I think it's true." 

Finn hopes it's true. Sometimes, on those days that the First Order hadn't kept him so busy he had managed to carve out time to think, he had wondered if his parents had ever said something similar when he had been taken from them. 

Maybe now--now that he is free--it would come true, even though he doesn't even know where to begin looking for his family. Maybe they are on the planet with the twin suns. He asks Poe if he knows of such a place.

"Lots of systems have two suns," Poe says. 

"A desert one."

"Tattooine is one. It's on the outer rim."

The Outer Rim where he had once intended to run. Maybe he can still go there, or maybe he can stay here. He tries to figure out what feels more right, but he feels nothing, and this scares him.

Maybe Poe sees something because he asks if Finn wants to be alone, and he rises at Finn's nod. He kisses Finn's knuckles in goodbye and BB-8 follows after. 

Finn falls into uneasy drowses, afraid that if he goes to sleep he might dream more and he does not want to dream. There is something uneasy, unsettling in the dreams he had had in the bacta tank, now that he remembers them a little more clearly. 

He almost welcomes the knock at his door and tries to sit up to attention when he sees it's General Organa. Then he wonders if she has come to order him to fight, to join the ranks of the Resistance. He hopes she hasn't. I won't kill for them, he had told Rey, and it was true for the First Order, and it is true for the Resistance. 

But she only tells him to lie still and he does, relief spreading through him as he watches her sit down in the same seat Poe had used. Her blue R2 unit trails after, sand falling in thin veils from its domed head. 

Finn frowns at the ribbon of desert the droid leaves behind as it settles beside the General.

"How are you feeling?" she says. Her face is serious, her cheeks pale and wan. There's sadness in her eyes, Finn thinks, and he remembers Han Solo, and that once they had embraced. He remembers that Han had called Kylo Ren Ben, his son, and he wonders if he is General Organa's son too. 

He is distracted from answering by the sand dunes forming beside R2D2, shimmers of sand falling and falling. 

General Organa leans towards him and takes his hand. "What do you see?"

Fear needles Finn, and he takes a shaky breath in. The sand is both there and it is not. It has the dreamlike quality, that shifting aspect like the deserts in his dream. He thinks, it is not real. He knows it is not real because no droid would be able to function with that quantity of sand within them. "What do you mean?" he says instead, to stave off the disbelief he knows will come if he tells General Organa anything. The scenario plays in his head: General Organa, adopting the pose and tone of Captain Phasma, ordering him to a ward for evaluation and reconditioning if necessary. He shudders, his eyes shuttering closed as he focuses on breathing. If he breathes too deeply, it hurts, and frustration seeps through him.

"I can sense something in you, Finn--an awakening." 

Finn holds his breath, and prays that she will continue.

"The force is strong in my family. My brother has it. I have it." She hesitates, but only for a moment. "My son has it." She raises her eyes to him and holds his gaze with a strength and intensity that half scares him and half assures him. 

Finn remembers Rey escaping, remembers Rey telling him that he wouldn't believe it (except he would, because he had seen so many unbelievable things what is one more). He doesn't remember Rey beating Kylo Ren in the snow, but she must have or they would not be here. 

"I'm not a Jedi," he says though he thinks that Rey must be. 

General Organa smiles at him. "Neither am I." She releases his hand and leans back in her seat. "So what do you see?"

He tells her about the sand beneath twin suns. About the snow. About the island. About the desert that R2 carries within itself. She listens carefully and does not interrupt at all. 

When he is finished and his voice lapses into silence, she remains very still for a moment. Then she tells him that both Luke and Anakin Skywalker, Kylo Ren's grandfather, grew up on Tattooine, and that it had also been home to a hermit named Obi Wan Kenobi. She tells him how she and Luke and Han and Lando had almost died on Tattooine. She tells him about the ice planet of Hoth, where Luke had met Obi Wan's ghost, come to speak to him like the mentor he should have been if Darth Vader had not struck him down. 

And then, finally, she tells him how Rey, right at that moment, was on her way to an isolated island, in the middle of nowhere, to bring Luke home. 

Quiet rests between them for a long time. "I don't understand," Finn finally says. "That's your family."

Finn doesn't know his family. He was taken too young to remember their faces or their names. Sometimes, when he holds the name Finn in his mouth like something good to eat, he wonders what they must have called him once upon a time, a long long time ago. 

Sometimes the absence of knowledge is a scarred ache, sometimes it's just something that is, and sometimes it just hurts. 

"I don't know," General Organa admits. "But I believe you are seeing visions through the Force, and maybe they will guide you to your family, or maybe they are showing you the future, where you will go, and what you will find. Maybe it's a metaphor--there's more than one kind of desert, one kind of cold wasteland. Or maybe they are showing you what has come before so that you can more easily find your place here and now because I believe you are important, Finn, because none of this would have happened without you."

"I didn't think the Force works that way," he says to the first part. 

"Who can truly know though," General Organa says.

To the second part, he says, "But I'm just a stormtrooper." Shame hollows his belly. He has to keep reminding himself that he's not one anymore. That he's done with that part of his life, that he's never going back. He squeezes his eyes shut and repeats it to himself until it sounds real.

"You're still someone who matters."

Finn thinks about this. Remembers the way that Poe had looked at him, when he had removed his helmet--and later had offered him a name he had accepted and made it his. Remembers the way that Rey had looked at him and then had offered him her hand. "Why is this--awakening--happening now?" 

"I don't think it did." General Organa rises, pacing in tight, corkscrew circles. "It came slowly, and softly, until you made the choice to do the right thing and rescue Poe, defecting from all that you knew, from all that you had been taught." 

"I needed a pilot," Finn says, the words coming as if from a great distance.

"And you needed a pilot because you wanted to do the right thing. You chose, Finn, to help your comrades. You chose to not open fire on the villagers. You chose to rescue Poe. You chose to turn your back and run far away from the people who had harmed you and so many other innocent people. You chose to go back for Rey and you chose to stay for the rebel fleet. You were waking up long before any of this. It's a process, not one singular moment. And it's still happening--you must feel it, that this is not your first step into a larger world but a milestone of a longer journey. The only difference now is that you're not alone."

His life stretches with sudden clarity like strands of silver stars shooting into hyperspace. "I see," he whispers, then again he says, "I see." Every moment when his mouth dried up as he had wondered if he was broken, every cold moment when he had wondered if he were the only one alone as he witnessed his troop mates forming something he could never be a part of stood in sudden clarity.

Am I alone? He isn't. Am I broken? He isn't. 

He is healing. 

He is left breathless.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I believe that Finn is absolutely force sensitive. I also hope the narrative will address Finn's past and family in the same way they are probably going to address Rey's. Whereas Rey was left behind, Finn was taken from his. They both deserve to learn their histories.


End file.
